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Bonjour Discovery

After the big Apple Leopard patch the other day, my HP printer stopped working. I could still ping it, but my Mac wasn't sending it print jobs, and that was that.

I don't automatically blame Apple for this. HP has a long, long history of making everything too darn complicated. No doubt companies of the same general size as HP appreciate all the extra crud built into their software, but for me, just let me send data to port 9100 and print it it - or not. On OS X 10.4, that's just how I had set up this printer: something like :

sudo lpadmin -p  HPLaser -E -v socket://10.1.36.221:9100 -m laserjet
 

But with Leopard, I had let the System Preferences Print & Fax tool have a crack at it, and sure enough, it found the printer through Bonjour, Apple's zero-conf networking discovery thingy. You can get Bonjour for Windows and Linux; "mDNSResponder" (the core of Bonjour) is open source. Although I have some reservations about dumbing everything down, it is nice to have "chatty" machines and services. Or at least it's nice when they work.

But when I returned to System Preferences now, it still had the printer, yet I couldn't convince it to send anything to actually be printed.

I thought I might try deleting the printer and adding it back. Deleting seemed to work fine, but clicking on "+" to have it find the printer again just gave me a spinning beach ball.. which never went away.. so I finally rebooted, and after that Bonjour instantly found my printer and I could print again.

All that made me curious about Bonjour. In scrounging about the Net, the first thing I came across was this Rawr-jour, which certainly looked like it would be fun to play with, but alas, it seems to have disappeared from our world. Oh well. I pecked about a little more and found Net::Bonjour on CPAN. I did a quick "sudo cpan" and then an "install Net::Bonjour" and then wrote this little program, mostly cribbed from the author's example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::Bonjour;
@service=qw( pdl-datastream riousprint printer http  ftp ssh afpovertcp ipp upnp uddi smb ipp);
foreach(@service) {
  $service=$_;
  print "Trying $service \n";
  my $res = Net::Bonjour->new($service, 'tcp');
  $res->discover;

  foreach my $entry ( $res->entries ) {
      printf "%s %s:%s\n", $entry->name, $entry->address, $entry->port;
  }
}
 

Why on earth did I list all those services? Well, for one thing, I was curious as to what other Bonjourish things might be running, but more directly, I had no idea what the HP had advertised. You see, there is this big list of DNS SRV (RFC 2782) Service Types and I have no idea which one HP uses. I thought it might have been "ipp", and when that didn't work I tried "printer", and when that came up dry I populated the list as you see it above. That found the printer strutting its stuff on "pdl-datastream":

Trying adisk 
Trying pdl-datastream 
HP LaserJet 1022n 192.168.1.4:9100
Trying riousprint 
Trying printer 
 

Cool. But it also surprised me:

Trying http 
HP LaserJet 1022n 192.168.1.4:80
Trying ftp 
Trying ssh 
Trying afpovertcp 
Trying ipp 
Trying upnp 
Trying uddi 
Trying smb 
 

I don't even know why I stuck http in there, but there it was. The printer is running a webserver. Now that isn't exactly thunderous news: an awaful lot of devices do that nowadays, but there had been nothing in the documentation I got with my printer that had mentioned this, so it was just a little surprising. Sure enough, a browser pointed at http://192.168.1.4 brought up configuration stuff that I had to use a Windows CD for when I bought the darn thing. How annoying that they didn't say anything about that.

A Bonjour service of course doesn't have to be hardware. It can be just about anything you can dream up, and I see great possibilities for perversion. For example, what's stopping you from implementing a print to fax service and letting the print service discover it as a Bonjour "printer". More interesting is what would stop you from implementing something far more deviant? Why, nothing at all, and if you'd like a head start on that, MacDevCenter has a couple of Mac posts about just that subject:

Incorporating Rendezvous into Your Cocoa Applications, Part 1
Incorporating Rendezvous into Your Cocoa Applications, Part 2

It's not hard to find Bonjour for Linux: Apple has ready to compile code (see Zeroconf (Bonjour) on Linux and has source for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and VxWorks, and also includes helper applications for browsing and advertising services. I easily found RPM's too: RPM resource libavahi-client.so.3 and an example of using that to advertise ssh.

This is how five minutes fixing a printer turns into a whole afternoon..

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